The D.C. Council returns to business from its summer break next week and high on the agenda is consideration of Mr. Charles Allen’s bill to force our city’s charter schools to comply with the open meetings law and the Freedom of Information Act. So if you want to get a taste of what these changes would mean for individual schools, just take a peek at what the DC Public Charter School Board is going through right now.

As a government entity, the PCSB already complies with FOIA requirements. Apparently, the American Federation of Teachers is filing nonstop requests with the charter board. The body has recently spent over 65 staff hours to fulfill seven solicitations. The final bid for documentation comes in at over 14,000 pages.

Here was the editors of the Washington Post’s view of Councilmember Allen’s charter school legislation last April:

“We are firm believers in sunshine in public matters, but this legislation — which seems to be taken from the national teachers union playbook on how to kneecap charter schools — is not designed to benefit the public or help students. It ignores the fact that the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which oversees the city’s 123 public charter schools, is already subject to both the open-meetings law and freedom-of-information requests. The board, which has earned national renown for the rigor of its standards, requires charters to disclose financial information, including how they use resources from the government and what they accomplish with those resources. Charters participate in state testing and federal accountability programs, and the charter board leads the way in providing comprehensive evaluations of charters and the job they do in educating students.”

The PCSB is apparently not taking this union abuse sitting down. According to education reporter Rachel Cohen, yesterday she was told by one of her sources that the charter board has decided it will no longer waive fees that it is permitted by law to charge for FOIA submissions. The source, who is almost certainly the AFT since Ms. Cohen is so union friendly, has been informed by the board that it will cost $3,500 “to finish fulfilling their records request.”

This is a fantastic move. The teachers’ unions have one mission regarding charters, which is to see them disappear from the face of the earth. But this activity from the AFT is highly worrisome. Could you imagine what would happen to our schools, which are characterized by exceedingly small administrative staffs, if they had to face a similar attack?

We must mobilize our local charter school movement to say enough is enough. Council members must not go along with Trojan Horse legislation that is proposed as a benign measure to increase transparency but is in reality a poison pill meant to torpedo the performance of our esteemed institutions.